“This is still a new fishery,” said Hank. “Nobody knows it all.”
“New for you, maybe. I’ve crabbed here ten years.”
“Don’t they fish grounds now that they didn’t then?”
“But they found ’em all long ago.”
“Hell,” declared Seth, “you’ve never heard of research, man? Out here you need the balls to try new things.” With Seth’s support, Hank prevailed. He already had three charts stored above his bed, which only Jody saw, covered with the marks and notes of his explorations.
And then it paid off. The first of three pots laid in an uncharted trench came up bulging to the web with fat keepers. The pot was so heavy the line groaned, and they attached an extra double block from the main boom to bring it all over the rail. Hank set his iron mike and leaped down to deck. They stared at the pot in near awe.
“She’s plugged like in the old days,” said Andy reverently.
Jody caressed Hank’s arm and Seth pounded him on the back.
They all took turns posing in front of it for Hank’s and Seth’s cameras, while Hank calculated out loud how long it would take to run to their closest string, clear the pots, and hustle them over. The picking was exuberant but silent as everyone counted his own. Every crab was a large male, wonderfully heavy for the Bering Sea. There were nearly four hundred crabs in the pot, compared to their normal haul of twenty to sixty.
“We’ve set on the fuckin wrestler’s convention!” yelled Seth.
They raised the other two pots to find catches of equal size. When the first two pots had been baited and returned and the third lay bulging on deck ready to be unloaded, Hank grabbed Jody and broke into a crazy dance. The others clapped time. Then Seth and Dan started together, and Jody went to Andy as the dance continued to the thump of their boots.
Suddenly Hank glanced at the water and exclaimed, “Juggernaut’s coming. Unload that son of a bitch!” He raced up to the wheel and steered so that his bow blocked Tolly’s view of the deck, while the others silently hustled the crab into the hold.
Tolly maneuvered his boat into voice range and called through cupped hands, “Doing all right, are you?”
It might have been Hank’s chance to show gratitude for past favors, but with the time come he’d no more have told Tolly the truth than would the others.
“Having a little grab-ass to warm up.”
Tolly grinned. He wasn’t fooled, and he had ten empty pots on deck. “Guess since you’re only working three here you won’t mind if I set a few.”
“Help yourself,” said Hank, trying to be casual. “Maybe you’ll have better luck.” They watched helplessly as Tolly’s crew set their string. Hank paced and churned inside. At least better for Tolly to share it than a stranger.
Then he felt guilty. He’d have hidden that trench even from Jones Henry, his fishing partner to whom he owed the most. To make up for bad intentions (or was it, he was honest enough to wonder, because the trench was no longer a secret?) he radioed Jones, who was working pots thirty miles away. After some standard exchanges, he said, “Not so impressive out here today. Only a Molly seventy-six.”
A pause as Jones evidently checked the words, which were their code (never yet used) for the ultimate catch. Then a curt “Read you. Too bad. Out.”
In a few hours they had both pulled and stacked a deckload of pots and had steamed back to lay them in the trench alongside Tolly’s.
Next day at dawn the three boats converged to work their pots simultaneously. They maneuvered close enough to each other to shout back and forth, since it was one of those Bering Sea days of rare calm. Tolly joked a long time about all the new buoys in the water.
“Well, buddy,” called Hank, “prepare to pop your eyes.” He was reconciled to sharing the trench, glad to have it with these two. After all, he’d discover others. “Go on,” he urged Tolly. “Pull yours first.”
The pot came up with six keepers. The next had only three, and another was flat empty. Jones’ pots, and his own, were no fuller.
Hank made light of it as best he could. To Tolly he called: “Crew does a rain dance and people think you’ve found crab.”
“Ah, buddy, does Jody do that to you? You owe me a six-pack of Scotches at the Elbow Room.”
“My pleasure.”
“That’s the fish business,” said Jones, also without rancor.
When the two had stacked their pots and left for better grounds, Hank remained. He cruised a grid over the spot, covering the chart with marks to correlate fathometer depths with loran and dead-reckoning fixes. The attempt to envision a seafloor through fifty fathoms of water made him feel like the blind man fingering an elephant. Finally he announced to Jody and the others in the wheelhouse, “It’s no trench, it’s only a hole. About ten fathoms deep, and not much more than a hundred fifty feet wide. How many could we set in there, Andy—half-dozen?”
“Even then, might snag your lines. Have to do it careful.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t bother,” said Hank tentatively. “We’re a good distance from our other gear, and the crabs might not fill the hole any more.”
It was Andy, the conservative, who had been affected most by the sight of the plugged pots. He gave the answer Hank hoped for. “I say it’s worth a little gamble to see that sight again.” The others agreed. They had all sniffed the chase.
They placed six pots in the hole with the precision of bomber pilots on a mission. Encouraged by their attitude, Hank next moved northward into new territory with the remaining pots, following his hunch of how the crabs might have migrated. They set clusters of two and three over a space of fifty miles, up close to the floating ice. Then they cruised back full speed to join the Adele and worked twenty hours straight to service all the pots they had left soaking.
They returned to the hole, spelling each other for one-hour tricks at the wheel through the night. The six pots came up plugged as full as the first time—more than two thousand heavyweight crab. Although they had taken no more than a few hours’ sleep in two days, they raced in a party mood to the other experimental pots. The first cluster was empty except for a large halibut and some codfish and pollock, which they cut for bait. (Hank regretted the halibut and insisted they slice a steak from it for dinner, but with their bait running short, a sixty-pound fish, illegal or not. .. They all did it.) The next cluster yielded a few keepers, and the next had been dragged away by an ice floe. The final two strings produced about two hundred keepers in each pot. He had found a new ground, fifty miles from the ones generally accepted. They couldn’t stop shouting, twirling Jody, slapping each other on the back.
The next days were spent moving gear from the old grounds, then racing to Dutch Harbor to unload and start with empty tanks.
Tolly’s boat was in also. During the hours it took the cannery crew to toss crab from Hank’s hold, he found Tolly and gleefully six-packed him with Scotch at the Elbow Room, making sure he drank it all. Then, with Tolly grinning and glassy-eyed, and with Jody watching in disbelief, Hank told him about the new grounds. Tolly heard it through absently. The jukebox was pounding and Hank had lowered his voice. Tolly tapped a fist affectionately against Hank’s chin and staggered off to find his latest cannery girfriend.
“Stupid!”
“I owe him favors, Jody. We even bunk in his house.”
“The hell with that. He brings in full loads without you. Help him if he’s in trouble, but otherwise keep your mouth shut.”
“Now wait. I figured those grounds, they’re mine to—”
“They belong to your boat! Think your crew worked those extra hours for fun?”
He had drunk too much with Tolly, and her intensity made him feel cornered. His chair clattered back as he rose and declared roughly “I’m skipper. Remember?”
She was up beside him, her chin no higher than his chest, but her eyes fierce enough to make him back away. “Then stick to finding the crab. The other decisions are my department if you can’t do better than this.”
They stormed back to the boat in a furious mood, not speaking. The fact that she was right did nothing for his anger. What had he married, what had he bought for himself? Couldn’t even leave her ashore. Should have listened to Jones Henry.
The next days were busy and sleepless as they transferred deck loads of pots and committed themselves to the new grounds. Tolly apparently had not comprehended the message in the bar, to Hank’s relief. They heard his banter from another area altogether. As for Hank and Jody, anger was difficult to sustain in the interdependent world of a boat, especially when they shared a narrow bed.
All at once the Bering waters north of Unimak Pass exploded with Japanese ships. The smallest of the foreign vessels was larger than any American boat on the grounds, while the factory motherships to which they delivered their catches were at least a dozen times as large. Coast Guard planes flew overhead, and a Coast Guard cutter sailed among them, evidently monitoring. The count of Japanese vessels, according to a conversation Hank overheard between the cutter and a plane: seven factory ships and their satellite fleets—five factories to process pollock, attended by ninety-four trawlers, and two factories for king crab, with thirty catcher boats. There were also twenty additional independent trawler-processors.
The crab factory fleets spread through the area where Jones and most of the other American skippers were crabbing. “Sons of bitches!” Jones’ voice exclaimed over the sideband. “Jap ships have dumped little pots all around me. My pot average has dropped from the forties to the twenties since they came. And the State Department lets them do it! I fought at Iwo, and now I pay taxes to kiss Jap ass.”
“Don’t forget de fuckin’ Russian asses,” added a deep Norwegian voice.
Hank’s own grounds were located north of the concentration, where only a single Russian trawler was working, and it kept him de tached. He wove the Nestor through the ships, watching curiously the busy little Japanese in hard hats and smelling with renewed amazement the processing stenches that evolved from fish that had just come so fresh from the sea. The number of foreign ships seemed excessive, but the Americans’ level of resentment troubled him also. He saw open water on every point of the horizon. Beneath it all, on levels through sixty fathoms and more, swam millions of sea creatures that constantly regenerated. Subsistence Asians relied on fish for protein, and here was the abundance. What of that concept of free enterprise that he had been taught to admire—didn’t it apply to other nations? What American fishermen needed to do was explore beyond their established grounds, as he was doing.
They set the last of their empty pots from the old area, then worked the ones that had been left to soak. Each pot continued to yield between a hundred and two hundred keepers. It was a satisfaction beyond imagining.
The others recognized it. Even Andy began to ask his opinion on matters he normally would have handled himself. Jody acknowledged his new status in less obvious ways, but he felt her approbation.
The weather ran the variety of the Bering Sea, from frigid blows that carried ice and kicked twenty-foot waves to gray flat calm. Hank let Seth relieve him at the wheel occasionally so that he could stretch his muscles on deck, when seas were safe under the control of a novice, but, increasingly, the stimulus of the chase held him close to the charts and depth sounder. When pots produced no more than a hundred, he plotted new locations within the area to increase their yield. He began to hope he might become one of the seasons highliners, equal to some of the Norwegians. Then they delivered a load to Dutch Harbor in less time than any other boat. Suddenly he became obsessed: the Nestor under his command could become the highline boat. He stopped talking by radio for fear of interesting other skippers in his position. He drove himself and the rest, regardless of the weather, for as long as they could endure and then beyond.
“Even the devil stops sometimes, you know,” said Jody. “Your guys are dead. They’re getting careless.” They had just run gear without a break through a day and a half of rough seas, and he was preparing to race down to their hole to pull the six special pots, then to return and work another string through the night.
He blinked through sandpaper eyes and snapped in a voice flat with fatigue, “I’ll judge when we get to the accident point.”
“That’s now, Hank.”
“No. There’s more in all of us. The guys aren’t complaining. Don’t you think I’ve worked on deck? You keep on the crab when they’re running. It’s what makes a highliner. They know it as well as I do. Go down and sleep. Nothing’s keeping you up.”
Her eyes filled. It was the first time he had seen her even close to tears except after the Delta had foundered. He put his arm around her and said gently, “Come on, darling, get some sleep. We’re okay.” He walked her to their cabin, pulled off her boots and rain pants and covered her with a blanket. By the time he had kissed her and turned out the light she was asleep.
A few hours later, with hail splattering white sheets across the water, the surge became so heavy that three lines snapped in succession. Hank blew several short blasts of the whistle. Within a minute the men had turned the crab block inboard, secured all gear, and gone inside. Through the transom came wordless grunts as they flopped into their bunks, hardly with time to remove their clothes. He checked the radar on all scales. Only the pip of the Russian trawler five miles away. The boat could drift safely. In bed, he eased Jody over to make room, set the alarm for four hours, and fell asleep on the instant.
Next afternoon, in clear weather, they had finished a huge meal and had run most of a string when he noticed the deck lights and mast of another crab boat on the horizon. If Jones Henry had come to share, okay, maybe even Tolly, but others ... He called several times on the sideband before rousing her. Trying to sneak up. It was the Nordic Queen, Arnie Larson’s big Seattle boat. Through binoculars he saw that Arnie carried a deckload of pots.
“Start stacking,” he called down.
“You crazy?” said Andy. “We’re on top these buggers.”
“Nordic Queen coming this way. I might owe Arnie a favor, but nothing like this.”
No further explanation necessary. He kept the Nestor turned so that they emptied and stacked a few pots with the bow blocking the Queens view. Then he circled back to the start of the string. By the time he permitted Arnie a clear sight of his deck they were raising empty pots—those they had picked and returned to the water only two hours before.
When the Nordic Queen eased alongside there were nine pots stacked on the Nestor’s deck. As many more remained in the water that were reliably empty, except that the crab on the seafloor were so abundant that most pots had already accumulated a few.
“Hey there, Hank.” called Arnie. “Way up here by yourself, I figure shit, dot fellow must be on the crabs.”
Hank shook his head ruefully. “Yesterday maybe so. Fuckers seem to have moved away.”
“Too bad.” Arnie’s eyes narrowed in his weathered face. “How many keepers vas you getting?”
“Oh . . He hated to be forced into a direct lie. “Of course it picked up for a while or I wouldn’t still be here. But looks like she’s fallen apart.”
Arnie nodded slowly, glancing everywhere on the Nestor’s deck. His crewmen along the rail did the same. Hank cursed the good weather to himself. A blow would have kept them farther off. Only a few more pots left before those plugged with crab, and then he’d have to think of an excuse not to pull more.
“I hear you deliver in Dutch Harbor pretty frequent.”
As Hank shrugged and figured what to reply, Seth called from deck. “Talk to him for us, Arnie. He won’t stay put. Last time I ship with a skipper on honeymoon. First he’s into port so they can be alone, then he’s got to be out where other boats don’t crowd him. You got an extra berth over there for me?”
Arnie pulled at his beard for a while, then gave up the subject. “Ja, Hank, I see already you got the old lady working baits. Dot’s gude training.” His big “Har har har” sounded like the Norweg
ian version of Santa Claus. “Hey, Jody, how you like being married to this guy? Should I say congratulations, or you vant us to give you a ride back to Dutch Harbor, eh? Har har har.”
It started them all joking back and forth. Being as far from other boats as they were, and on a calm day at that, Hank should have invited Arnie to tie alongside for mug-up. But then the Norwegians would see the mass of crab in their tank. He continued to hold out for time, as the Nordic Queen circled and circled.
Two pots remained of the ones he could count on when Arnie called, “You coming back to the main grounds? I vait and we go together.”
“I’m not through experimenting.” Hank grinned. “Still on my honeymoon.”
“Ja, ja.” Arnie tooted and left. Hank held to the game of empty pots until the Nordic Queen had left binocular range. Then he harvested the remainder of the string, with two hundred keepers and more in each. The game both shamed and exhilarated him. Alone as he was except for the Russian trawler, there might come a time when he needed help, and he knew Arnie would give it freely. Well, as would he himself. The rest was the fish business. If Jones Henry had come, that would have been different. No doubts on the part of the others. Seth was the hero of the day for his quick tongue. They relived the scene over and over as they worked the pots.
Yet the mast and deck lights of Arnie’s boat did not disappear over the horizon. Hank checked often on radar to make sure. The boat was hovering nine miles away, or laying its own pots.
The Russian trawler, which had at first traveled a long path as far away as the Nordic Queen, moved closer daily. Hank decided to bide time by paying a visit. Besides, “Better let him know were here so he looks out for our pots.”
The ship had its trawl in the water, as evidenced by two taut cables slanting from the stem. As Hank brought the Nestor close, the rusty white hull of the Russian grew proportionately higher until it rose triple the height of their own wheelhouse. Hank adjusted his boat to the snailish trawling speed and tooted his whistle.
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